Anti-Semitic Muslim Professor Forces Students to Tweet on Islamophobia

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On February 5, 2014 @ 7:08 pm In The Point | 9 Comments

Hatem Bazian is one of the leading figures in promoting Islamization and hate on American campuses. Old Hate’em pioneered open support for terrorism and anti-semitism on campus.

Steven Emerson, in his book American Jihad, quotes Bazian sermonizing at an American Muslim Alliance conference in May 1999, promoting the Islamic State of Palestine. Excerpts from the quote read, “In the Hadith, the Day of Judgment will never happen until you fight the Jews . . . and the stones will say, ‘Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him!’”

After a 2002 Students for Justice in Palestine rally at UC Berkeley resulted in the arrest of 79 protesters, Bazian spoke at a follow-up rally protesting the arrests. “If you want to know where the pressure on the university [i.e., to prosecute the demonstrators] is coming from, look at the Jewish names on the school buildings,” he said.

Two weeks ago, I received a panicked message from a student enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley.

He wrote: “I’ve been told by one of my professors I will be required, as part of my grade, to start a Twitter account and tweet weekly on Islamophobia. I can’t help but feel this is unethical. This is his agenda not mine.”

The professor conducting this exercise was Hatem Bazian as part of a course titled, “Asian American Studies 132AC: Islamophobia”.

When I asked him to elaborate on his concerns the student wrote: “There are 100 students in the class, all of us forced to create individual Twitter accounts. I’m not wholly clear on what our final project is yet (I find it very interesting that he excludes both the Twitter account requirement AND the final project from his official syllabus), but we have to meet with a group in San Francisco, and our class will be surveying people of color on the impact of some ads put out by (anti-Sharia blogger) Pamela Gellar. Now I’m no Pamela Gellar fan, I think she’s nuts, but I feel … between the Twitter stuff and the final project he’s basically using us as unpaid labor to work on his agenda.”

…

The fact remains Prof. Bazian appears to be using his position of authority to make 100 students — mostly non-Muslims — tweet about Muslim victimhood in America, irrespective of how it’s defined or whether it exists.

No student I have seen on Twitter has yet posted a tweet saying Islamophobia is a myth, nor has any student challenged the validity of the term.

Here is a sampling of tweets by Prof. Bazian’s students:

One tweeted: “How difficult it is to be a Muslim woman in America”; Another wrote about “Islamophobia in Canada”; while a third tweeted, “One perspective of Islam is to view it as inferior to the West. Where does this notion of cultural superiority come from?”

This abusive behavior isn’t a unique invention by Bazian. Academics use their students to push agendas on social media and increasingly tie classwork to online activities blurring the line between required classwork and personal advocacy.

Even aside from Hatem Bazian’s hateful views, that’s a troubling boundary issue with students being forced to put forward a single opinion as their own in a public forum that goes outside the school. It’s the equivalent of ordering students to write letters to the editor promoting a particular point of view and only that point of view. It’s an inversion of academic freedom.